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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
16 September 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
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Stephen Clare is a third sector business adviser and coach, and Director of Cyta Consultancy Ltd. Previously he was Deputy Chief Executive of Locality.
What is leadership? Such a simple question, and yet it has generated thousands of books and an industry in its own right. Everywhere managers are told that they need to be leaders – but leadership is nothing to do with seniority or one’s position in the hierarchy of an organisation. Leadership has nothing to do with titles. Leadership isn’t even necessarily anything to do with personal attributes. We don’t need extroverted charismatic traits to practice leadership. And those with charisma don’t automatically lead.
Leadership and management are not synonymous. They are two different things. Of course, good management is needed. Managers need to plan, measure, monitor, coordinate, solve, hire, fire, and so many other things. Typically, managers manage things. And leaders lead people. However, I would also argue that one of the major barriers to change we face today is that people think they have to wait for a ‘leader’ to emerge – somebody who ‘knows better’, the traditional ‘hero’ who embodies the future. I think the very opposite is true.
Over the years, I’ve learned to define leadership differently. A leader is anyone willing to help, anyone who sees something that needs to change and takes the first steps to influence that situation. It might be a parent who intervenes in their child’s school; or a woman in a rural village in India who works to get clean water; or a citizen who rallies the community to stop a library closure. Everywhere in the world, no matter the economic or social circumstances, people step forward to try and make a small difference. That, for me, is the starting position in understanding leadership – it’s about taking action, it’s about doing something, it’s about changing the world in some way. And leadership is also an act of humility – an act of service to others. To quote management guru Tom Peters: “Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.”
Today, many of us are ‘swimming in the same river’ – trying to cultivate collective leadership in diverse settings around the world even while our larger cultural contexts remain firmly anchored to the myth of the heroic leader. Even in the VCSE sector, there is still an over-emphasis on the individual ‘hero-leader’ which perhaps reflects our tendency to look to business for answers rather than developing approaches that make sense in an environment that is very different. Indeed, I would go further: we need to recognise the dangers and potentially destructive consequences of singling out the individual VCSE leader and heralding them as exceptional (1).
Our challenge is therefore to nurture a new type of leadership that doesn’t depend on the illusion of extraordinary individuals. The leadership of the future will not be provided simply by individuals but by groups, communities and networks. And these leaders must '… work to create the space where people living with a problem can come together to tell the truth, think more deeply about what is really happening, explore options beyond popular thinking, and search for higher leverage changes through progressive cycles of action and reflection and learning over time' (2).
1. Pennington, Hilary, Why Rewarding Leaders Might Hurt Collaboration, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2016. See http://ssir.org/articles/entry/why_rewarding_leaders_might_hurt_collaboration
2. Peter Senge, Hal Hamilton & John Kania, The Dawn of System Leadership, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2015. See http://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_dawn_of_system_leadership
Tags:
community
culture
humble
management
service
skills
value
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
09 September 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
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Our Chief Executive Shaks Ghosh shares the personal lessons she learned from Mother Teresa’s leadership, following the humanitarian's recent cannonisation.
While Mother Teresa was doing her missionary work in Calcutta, I was a student at the city's Loreto Convent, the place where Mother Teresa started her leadership journey. It was a source of some amusement to us students - our politics and views about social action could not have been further from hers.
As young socialist students, we did not always appreciate her methods and devotion and often criticised her actions. We wished that she would do more to address the causes of suffering. We felt that simply offering love and dignity to the starving thousands was going to change nothing.
How wrong we were! The Mother did much to raise the issues of poverty globally; her advocacy for the poor, and her courageous admonishment of governments, the wealthy and the powerful have become legendary. She lived the life of the poor - to her dying day she shared a room with four other women. I now regret that as young politicos, we were so harsh in trivialising her preachings of love, humility and service.
Last week when she was being cannonised we heard about her doubts, her questions of her God and her faith. A salutary reminder that the road of meaningful leadership is paved with loneliness, sacrifice and self doubt. Mother Teresa was not always at peace.
My own mother served with Mother Teresa, working with children in her leprosy orphanage and raising funds for the houses where poor people of Calcutta still go to die. She met The Mother only once, and received one of her famous 'calling cards' which were what she called her business cards. Printed on the reverse were the powerful words, 'The fruit of love is service, and the fruit of service is peace'. RIP Mother Teresa.
Tags:
culture
peace
service
value
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
06 September 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
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Dr Henry Kippin is executive director of Collaborate an independent CIC focusing on the thinking, culture and practice of cross-sector collaboration.
Leadership is a slippery concept. A verb, not a noun. A spirit, not a skillset. It is a term that is broad and deep enough to mean both everything and nothing. But there is no doubt that if leadership matters (as Richard Harries’s excellent paper suggests), then we need to strive to make sure that the concept can hold the weight we ascribe to it. This means we need to work on it.
The concept of leadership development is becoming more tricky to grasp in line with the changing context around it. This throws up more questions than answers. But anyone OK with a degree of complexity and nuance should absolutely welcome that. Peoples’ lives are complex and multi-faceted, so why should we expect positively changing them to be any less so?
Collaborate’s work is about supporting people who want to lead change through collaboration. Our work is about blurring sector boundaries to improve outcomes for the public. By its very nature, it unpicks the way we define sectors and understand services, and in this context effective leadership may have some counterintuitive traits. Let me explain…
1. Great organisational leadership is necessary but not sufficient – those with an eye on health and social care reform (for example) will note the prevalence of high quality hospitals functioning brilliantly within places in which some social outcomes haven’t changed for decades. Does great leadership mean more of the same? Clearly not. But just as unwelcome is a narrow version of system change that might help to keep organisations sustainable but is just as far from real co-production as ever. If the Brexit vote shows us anything, it is the acute need to close this gap. Social sector leaders should be actively working together to do so.
2. Collaboration and consensus make awkward bedfellows – any meaningful change is hard to effect. Yet we often expect this to happen across different organizations with multiple incentives in a complex environment with a remarkable degree of ease. Hope over experience on a grand scale! Beyond creating good vibes in the room, collaborative leaders need to know how to be honest, when to say no (or even better: ‘I don’t know!’), and how to create the right commitment devices to support collective progress against shared goals with multiple stakeholders. That is why we talk about building ‘collaboration readiness’: it isn’t easy.
3. The social sector silo is dead. Long live collaborative social change – social change is not the preserve of the social sector, and nor can the sector deliver some of the aspirations it exists to address in-and-of-itself. Look at the JRF’s strategy for ending poverty: a clear role for business, government and society. Leaders need to care as much about their terms of engagement with other systems and sectors as their own independence, seeing their world through others’ eyes. For a 17-year old looking for work, a smartphone, a broadband connection and a mate with a job are the critical ingredients. None of these things are delivered as public services; none of these things are innate social goods. Yet social sector leaders recognize that part of their role is creating the conditions for these things to be accessible.
So how do we operationalise some of these insights in response to Shaks Gosh’s challenge of ‘new solutions’ and a need for ‘structured leadership development’? Collaborate’s own efforts have been written up recently as the Anatomy of Collaboration: the critical components of cross-sector leadership and delivery as defined by an expert group convened in partnership with Oxford University. One quote from a prominent social sector leader stands out for me: “Collaboration is an offer, not a demand. It should always come with a decent pitch”. One might say the same about leadership.
Please share your views and comments below, you can also follow Dr Kippin on Twitter @h_kippin.
Tags:
challenges
change
charitysector
collaboration
culture
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
12 August 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
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Today is World Elephant Day, so I’m taking the opportunity to talk about the elephant in the room - the exclusiveness in our sector.
It’s almost two years since an analysis of the top 50 fundraising charities revealed that 88% of Chief Executives were white, and 70% male. In senior management roles 94% were white, and 56% male. This is a sharp contrast to the society that we all live in and yet not much seems to have changed. So, why all the white guys?
As part of my Clore Social Leadership journey, I am currently working with in Washington D.C. I’ll be here for six weeks and as I’m learning so much here, I explored with the organisation what I might feasibly do for them in such a short time. What are their priorities? I was delighted to hear the response of: ‘We’d like to be an even more welcoming and inclusive organisation’. Given my passion for leaders making decisions with, and not for the communities that we serve, I’m excited to see what I can do.
In exploring this important issue, I can’t ignore a social and political context to discussing diversity in our world today. Racial tensions in the U.S. are high as a result of disproportionate shootings of African American men killed by the police. Recent shootings of police officers have been called ‘revenge attacks’, and organisations such as are accused of race-baiting. Worldwide, we are hearing increased political rhetoric that risks inciting or spreading fear and can contribute to a feeling of different=DANGEROUS. I’m fortunate in Defender’s that the organisation understands the power of diversity, and have identified increasing diversity as a priority, so I don’t need to have the conversation here. But we absolutely need to be having the conversation in our sector.
In this context I ask myself, how do we have a conversation about diversity and inclusion that can create the change without making the white men feel excluded, or even threatened? (Then there’s a whole internal dialogue that argues ‘who cares if they’re threatened, they need to get over it’, but I’m not sure if that will affect the change we need).
Maybe we could start by making ‘diversity’ more inclusive?
Often our sector can see diversity as an HR issue, or we create tick-boxes to monitor how we’re doing. More progressive thinking recognises that diversity goes beyond race, gender, religion, age etc. It recongnises that I’m diverse in the speed in which I learn, as well my sexual identity. Diversity goes beyond the visible. As a sector, we should lead the way in celebrating all diversity. As a priority this must include recognising individual differences that cause disadvantage, such as the people’s race or religion, and making real and determined efforts to mitigate the impact of those differences in our employment practices.
I know that we need the best minds to solve the big challenges that face our sector today, and the more diverse those minds the better. I know that a diverse workforce can help to redress our unconscious bias, and give us the best chance to connect with and understand the communities that we serve. I strive to create an inclusive environment but I look at the teams that I’ve been responsible for recruiting and I know that we don’t represent Scotland’s vibrancy, and diversity. The question I really need to be asking myself is ‘why?’, and I invite you to do the same.
Tags:
chairs
challenges
change
charitysector
culture
diversity
inclusion
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Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
20 June 2016
Updated: 07 December 2020
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"Are you a brilliant public speaker?"
As chief officers of voluntary organisations there is increasing pressure on us all to be ‘great communicators’, so it’s a pretty loaded question.
I need to state straight away that I do not pretend to be a brilliant public speaker … but I am improving. I have been director of Barnardo’s Scotland for 9 years now and speeches go with the job. However, my early efforts were truly awful so from my own grim experience I am happy to offer my scale of public speaking:
Level 1: Read speech from prepared notes; success is reaching the end without being sick on stage.
Level 2: Look up occasionally from prepared notes; success is reaching the end with some of the audience still awake.
Level 3: Present a speech from notes with occasional ad libs; success is a polite round of applause at the end.
Level 4: Deliver a speech using only a prompt sheet; success is eye contact with the audience and questions at the end.
Level 5: Perform centre stage with no notes: success is energy and excitement, your own and your audience.
So, if you can do Level 5 are you a brilliant speaker? Not necessarily. You can be oozing self-confidence and have fun delivering what you think is the most moving and insightful speech since Nelson Mandela but the judgement of your brilliance rests with the audience.
So what is it that an audience wants from a speech? Well, in my view it’s a combination of three things: expertise, passion and gravitas. The balance between the three will shift on each occasion but as charity chiefs we have to demonstrate some degree of each.
The chief officer will rarely be the most expert on a subject and frontline workers are often the most passionate but the thing we should bring to a speech is gravitas – if the boss is talking about something then it must be important!
If we consider expertise, passion and gravitas as points on a triangle then as individuals we will each have a ‘comfort zone’ within the triangle in which we like to operate. As my public speaking has improved my comfort zone has expanded – I can appear to be expert, do a bit of passion and lay on the gravitas when needed.
But even if you are a confident speaker and tailor your speech to the audience, you won’t impress everyone. Because the problem is that an audience is made up of individual people all of whom receive communications differently. Some people like facts and figures, some people like visuals and some just want passion. One person’s inspiring speaker is another person’s show off!
This isn’t all an elaborate argument to say that Level 1 presentation skills are acceptable but it does mean that that you can answer the question “Are you a brilliant public speaker?” with a confident ‘no’ – because there is no such thing.
You can tweet Martin on @CreweMartin.
Would you like to contribute a blog to Leaders Now? Please email your ideas to info@cloresocialleadership.org.uk.
Tags:
confidence
culture
publicspeaking
skills
speech
storytelling
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